Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco’s community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.

The surveys help inform Alfresco’s technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco’s chief marketing officer. “It’s important for us to know which platforms to test against first,” he said, adding, “It’s in users’ interest to give us good data.”

Users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.

Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2 percent, compared to 63 percent for Windows XP and 28 percent for Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft’s Office suite remained strong, however, with 66 percent usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.

Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72 percent. JBoss’ entry stood at 18 percent. Entries from Sun, BEA and IBM rounded out the field.

In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61 percent. Microsoft‘s Virtual Server took 16 percent, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and “other” offerings, according to the study.

MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60 percent tally, followed by Oracle with 14 percent and Microsoft SQL Server with 13 percent.

“It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack,” Howells said of the overall results.

Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, while 24 percent were in the U.S., and 26 percent from other nations, Alfresco said.

POLICE in Avon and Somerset are getting a new high tech service to help them access vital information while out on patrol.

Officers are being provided with secure access to records and information over the web or on mobile communication devices, enabling them to retrieve data while out in the field.

The new system is being introduced as a part of an extended partnership between the force and IT firm Northgate Information Solutions, aimed at providing key information to officers when and where they need it most.The firm signed a £500,000 four year contract with the force last October and is now working to further improve its Guardian Records Management System, helping officers to act more quickly and efficiently thanks to the ability to input, store and access records.

Previously officers in the field had to log on to separate systems to access information such as whether a suspect was known to police, a last known address and criminal records data.

Assistant Chief Constable Steve Mortimore said: “Our officers can quickly see intelligence and crime records held across the force’s systems, which means proactive policing and a faster response.

“We are committed to using this information more effectively to inform operations and meet our day to day and strategic priorities.

“We are delighted to be working with Northgate to open up access to information that really makes a difference for officers in the field, and ultimately for the neighbourhoods they serve.”

(Nasdaq:SSYS) Stratasys today introduced a new additive fabrication system for prototyping and direct digital manufacturing applications. The FDM 360mc(TM) was unveiled at the Medical Design & Manufacturing (Pacific Design) Show in Anaheim.

The FDM 360mc was designed for users with demanding applications that require the same accuracy, repeatability, and material specifications of more expensive FDM systems but who don´t need as much speed or as many features.

“The FDM 360mc is even lower-priced than our Vantage i,” says FDM Product Manager Patrick Robb. “It´s now the least expensive system in our high-performance line, yet it has all the accuracy and repeatability of our high-end FDM 400mc.(TM) It offers both direct digital manufacturing and accurate prototyping with an easy-to-realize return on investment for most any production operation or development group. With some of the more expensive ´3D printers´ priced in the $50,000 to $75,000 range, the FDM 360mc will compete with them on price, yet remain in a league above them in output quality.”

The performance of the FDM 360mc is the result of technology innovation and manufacturing process improvements in the extrusion head gantry, which enabled it to be straighter and stiffer. This enables the extrusion head to hold a tighter positional accuracy that can produce parts with a higher tolerance. These innovations were introduced last August on the FDM 400mc.

The FDM 360mc builds with ABS-M30, which offers substantial improvements over standard Stratasys ABS across a number of mechanical properties, including tensile strength, impact strength, and flexural strength. ABS-M30 mechanical properties for strength are up to 67 percent stronger than standard Stratasys ABS, expanding capabilities for functional testing or building production parts.

The FDM 360mc comes standard with a build envelope of 14 x 10 x 10 in (356 x 254 x 254 mm), which is upgradeable to 16 x 14 x 16 in (406 x 356 x 406 mm). Along with this upgrade comes two more material canisters bays, for a total of four bays (two build material and two support material). The larger build envelope and the additional material canisters enable users to run larger builds. When the first material canister is empty, an auto-changeover function loads the second canister and continues the build process uninterrupted. This allows users to leave the machine unattended for long periods of time.

Available slice thicknesses are 0.005 in (0.127 mm), 0.007 in (0.178 mm), 0.010 in (0.254 mm), and 0.013 in (0.330 mm).

The FDM 360mc will begin shipping immediately.

Stratasys Inc., Minneapolis, manufactures additive fabrication machines for prototyping and direct digital manufacturing. It also offers prototype and part manufacturing services. According to Wohlers Report 2007, Stratasys supplied 41 percent of all additive fabrication systems installed worldwide in 2006, making it the unit market leader for the fifth consecutive year. Stratasys patented and owns the rapid prototyping process known as fused deposition modeling (FDM(R)). The process creates functional prototypes and end-use parts directly from any 3D CAD program, using ABS plastic, polycarbonate, PPSF, and blends. The company holds more than 180 granted or pending additive fabrication patents globally. Stratasys products are used in the aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, education, electronic, and consumer product industries. On the Web: http://www.Stratasys.com

FDM 360mc is a trademark, and FDM is a registered trademark, of Stratasys Inc.

The 13 different agencies that signed the information sharing contract on 1 September last year had reason to celebrate: theirs was the first large group of public sector bodies that had made a legally binding commitment to share information over a common IT infrastructure. South-West Peninsula Partnership, a group of local councils and NHS trusts, signed a licence to use a hosted social care application to share information about the hundreds of thousands of adults who use their services every year.

The 13 agencies also agreed to interface their existing social care systems – they use a variety of different suppliers – with the hosted application to make information sharing electronic.

Devon and Cornwall’s councils and NHS trusts have been quicker to share information than the public sector in the rest of England. Nowhere else in England has seen both health and local government agree to share data on so many people and across county boundaries. Information sharing was identified as one of the priorities for local government in the Transformational Government Annual Report 2006 – the most recent IT strategy document from Whitehall’s CIO Council. Although central government has set up a committee to promote information sharing, too few agencies share data electronically. The committee was supposed to publish a report on information sharing in July last year. It has yet to be released.

Although the information-sharing contract has been signed, the South-West Peninsula Partnership’s progress has been slow. Back in June 2006, Keri Storey, the deputy director of health and social care for Devon County Council and Exeter Primary Care Trust, predicted that the contract would be signed in August that year. IBM and Esprit, which are providing the hosting services and the software respectively, have been preferred bidders since March 2006.

The contract was originally expected to cover 20 agencies working in Devon and Cornwall. The 10 NHS trusts have all stayed with the project, but seven councils have yet to sign up.

The complexity of drafting a contract for so many different public sector agencies is the reason for the delay, says Marisa Smyth of Devon County Council’s social care information systems team. “We are further behind than we would like to be. It took us longer to set up the contract than we originally anticipated and that was because of the complexity in arranging the contract,” she says.

Important progress has been made in agreeing what information everyone should collect and what should be shared. Each agency has been using a toolset – a set of forms commonly used by both social workers and health professionals – for the last 12 months. By using the same forms, the agencies are collecting the same information. The 13 different IT departments involved in the project will be able to send the same information to the hosted application as soon as the electronic interfaces are built.

More importantly the IT departments will be able to start work on the project knowing that the end users in their organisations have approved the type of information that will be shared. “We are already using a shared toolset so everyone working in health and social care [in the 13 organisations] is asking the same questions and collecting the same data,” says Smyth. “We have used the toolset for well over 12 months now. At Devon County Council, we have put the toolset into our main social care IT system CareFirst electronically.” The Carefirst application is supplied by OLM.

The agencies took a long time to agree on the toolset that they would all use. “It took a minimum of six months to agree what toolset we should all use. The agencies looked at a number of different assessment tools,” says Smyth. All 13 agencies decided to use forms from a company called Functional Analysis in the Care Environment (Face). Both NHS trusts and social services departments were providing a better standard of care after 12 months of collecting the same data and sharing some paper records, according to David Johnstone, Devon County Council’s director of adult and community services. “The scheme showed us that sharing information greatly improved communication between health and social care teams. The outcome was less duplication, less repetition and more focus from staff. As a result our patients and clients have been getting the right care packages to meet their needs.”

Electronic information sharing will start when the councils build interfaces between their own social care systems and the hosted application, called Sharecare, from Esprit Two of the three councils in the partnership – Devon County Council and Plymouth City Council – use OLM’s Carefirst application. They plan to cooperate over the development of the interface with Sharecare. The other council, Cornwall County Council, uses another application to manage social services. It expects to be the first agency to go live with a link to Sharecare in mid-May. Confusingly, Cornwall’s interface with the hosted application is being developed jointly with Torbay Council, which has not joined the partnership. “Cornwall and Torbay have the same requirements,” says Smyth. Torbay has yet to confirm that it will join the partnership.

The government’s plans to redraw the local government map in Devon have not helped. Devon already has three councils that provide social services to adults: the county council, Plymouth City Council and Torbay Council. A fourth council, Exeter, was selected by Whitehall to provide social services to both adults and children in the city from April 2009. Exeter City Council passed successive central government tests for its suitability as a social services authority throughout 2007 only for Whitehall to halt the process at the end of the year shortly after the county council threatened to sue Exeter if it continued to seek independence as a unitary authority.

Pete Edwards, Exeter City Council’s elected leader was furious when central government withdrew support. “We are urgently seeking a meeting with ministers to understand the reasoning behind the decision,” he says. “We put forward a strong and compelling case for unitary government in Exeter which will deliver better services, value for money and local accountability. We believe we met the government’s criteria and there is no suggestion that a unitary Exeter should not be created.

“We regret the delay to a unitary authority for Exeter. We are, however, confident that we will achieve our objective of a unitary Exeter,” says Edwards. Exeter City Council’s chief executive, Philip Bostock, says: “We are obviously frustrated by this decision as we passionately believe in a unitary authority based on the city, and any delay to achieving this is obviously a setback. We are, however, confident of overcoming this further obstacle in reaching the goal that so many in Exeter support.”

The bitterness caused by Exeter’s ill-fated bid to provide social services within the city boundaries, especially the threat of a legal challenge from the county council, might make cooperation between Exeter and the other local authorities in the area less likely in future. Cornwall County Council does not suffer from the same problem: it is the only council in the county to provide social services. However, in 2006, Storey says that the partnership was expected to include the six district councils in Cornwall. These councils – Caradon, Carrick, Kerrier, North Cornwall and Penwith district councils, plus Restormel Borough Council – are no longer expected to share information with the 13 agencies in the partnership.

The 13 members of the partnership are Cornwall County Council, Cornwall & Isles of Scilly Primary Care Trust, Devon County Council, Devon Doctors, Devon Primary Care Trust, Northern Devon Healthcare Trust, Plymouth City Council, Plymouth Primary Care Trust, Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, Royal Devon and Exeter Foundation Trust, South Devon Healthcare Foundation Trust, South Western Ambulance Service Trust, and the Torbay Care Trust. The members have yet to disclose how much the contracts with IBM and Esprit are worth and how much they will spend on the information sharing project.

Nobody knows how many people’s medical and social care records are held by the members of the partnership, but there is little doubt that the project is the largest example of information sharing in England’s public sector. Smyth says that Devon County Council alone holds the records of “tens of thousands of social care clients”. More than 1,000 employees have access to Devon’s Carefirst system. Those figures will be repeated across the other 12 agencies in the partnership. Each person will have to give consent before their information can be uploaded to Sharecare through an IBM Websphere application server and a SQL Server database.

People will be able to give two types of consent: they can give permission for basic information to be uploaded to ShareCare or they can opt for more detailed information including confidential medical details to be uploaded.

Some key details of the project have yet to be finalised. The partnership has yet to decide whether to automatically combine two sets of records on the same person that are currently held by different agencies. “There might be some automatic matching, but we would need to work out the details. Some of this detail is what’s being worked through and they obviously did not want to get into too much detail until the contract was signed,” says Smyth.

“For the children’s system, the government keeps giving out changed requirements so there’s a whole lot of integration work to do in the next few years,” she says. “Over the last two years, we have moved every child [who had a social care record] on to the Integrated Children’s System (ICS). The ICS regulations state how we must hold the data and it makes social workers responsible for maintaining the data. We still held data before the introduction of ICS, but we held it in paper case files. Now the case file is held electronically in a structured way.”

The devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are already further ahead with information sharing than the big English authorities. The Northern Irish authorities have agreed to an extensive shared services programme. England’s local authorities have a long way to go before they can achieve the information sharing ambitions set out in the Transformational Government annual report. Devon and Cornwall’s project, political disputes aside, is a rare attempt to make large-scale information sharing work in the public sector.

OXFORDSHIRE, UK – (HealthTech Wire) – The RadCentre radiology information system from IBA company iSOFT now offers real-time speech recognition so dictations appear instantly as screen text, which speeds the time to produce critical radiology reports and share patient diagnoses.

RadCentre seamlessly integrates the SpeechMagic technology from Philips, and together is proven to increase productivity. Early adopters are already witnessing improved workflows, a faster turnaround of reports, and reduced waiting times for patients and referring doctors.

Featuring Intelligent Speech Interpretation, this solution produces highly accurate radiology reports with a minimum of human intervention. It not only recognises words but also understands the context, so is able to ignore dialogue that is not part of the dictation, implement dictated corrections and rephrase sentences. The software can also fill information into forms, and formats and organises text, for example adding section headings, numbering and standard content to produce usable reports.

Gary Williams, partner programme manager for Philips Speech Recognition Systems, said: “More than 8,000 organisations world-wide have now implemented speech recognition solutions which are powered by SpeechMagic to optimise document creation and improve healthcare efficiency. Together with iSOFT we can now further improve patients’ healthcare experience and potentially save lives by speeding up documentation flows and ensuring the availability of patient information when needed, where needed.”

SpeechMagic is the most advanced and widely-used speech recognition technology in European healthcare today according to Frost and Sullivan.

Paul Richards, managing director, iSOFT UK and Ireland, said: “Digital dictation of diagnostic reports and the ability to send voice files electronically for typists to transcribe was a vast improvement over the previous method of sending cassette tapes. Real-time speech recognition promises even greater time savings, which is especially vital in emergencies.

“The speed, accuracy and security of radiology reports are improved markedly, with the clinical radiologist able to create and verify the report as a single, continuous process. Being able to dictate reports, and see them instantly on screen, saves radiologists having to check, correct and possibly re-send reports for typing.”

The RadCentre real-time speech recognition option is network-based, highly scalable, and can be administered and managed centrally.

21 January 2008 – Dubai – Information technology systems are an essential and strategic component of every enterprise and every building. For those who design and manage Enterprise Information and Communication Technology systems, the guiding principle has always been – Better, Faster, Cheaper. Give clients better performing systems to achieve results faster and reduce costs. Today a new element has to be added to that mandate – environmental responsibility.

According to IDC, energy and cooling expenses will grow eight times faster than the amount of money spent on purchasing new servers through 2010, warns APC-MGE, a global leader in power, cooling, and management solutions. Predictions show that changes in power supply and cooling in data centers will have a serious impact on users, suppliers of data center solutions and energy sources. In fast growing regions such as the GCC, power is in short supply. This calls for technology solutions that address this challenge fast.

The majority of existing data centers (and some of the new ones being implemented now) are not suitable for operating high-density systems. Data center suppliers and operators must change their approach to apply the new technologies. “The presence of higher power in data centers will directly affect all users.

IDC predicts that in 2010 the amount spent on cooling and powering the existing installed base of servers will be over 70% of what is spent on purchasing new servers,” warns Christian Bertrand, ME Business Development & Support Director at APC-MGE. “Building completely new data centers might be cheaper than reorganizing conventionally-built ones, even in the medium-term. We could say that the data center design methodology of yesterday, the conventional server technologies and today’s requirements together will form the greatest IT challenge of tomorrow,” added Bertrand.

Information systems provide an increasingly ubiquitous network within the companies, and offer services in new fields. Using this network, companies can provide faster and better services to their customers, including RFID and VoIP solutions. The emerging and broadening information services also induce changes in data centers; they require more servers and processors, higher network and storage capacity. Due to these changes, IT professionals face the following challenges:

Speed and Agility: The world of business that requires increasingly faster response relies more and more on information systems. The imperfection of an information system must not hold back the launch of a new service or project. In addition, this must be provided in a solution where investment grows with revenue: “Pay as You Grow”. Impact on the infrastructure: modular and scalable solutions are needed for power supply and cooling.

Footprint, rental costs, and expansion possibilities: Placing more equipment requires more floor space, requiring constant expansion of data centers. The costs associated with occupied areas (for example rental costs) limit expansion possibilities, particularly in downtowns, and in several cases server rooms cannot be enlarged due to the lack of free space in the building. Area limitations motivate IT professionals for dynamic growth, namely they have to provide higher performance by server consolidation and high-density applications using the same floor space. This solution can be implemented by using 1U and blade servers, or virtualization technologies. Impact on the infrastructure: higher power consumption, higher power density, and overheating problems when using conventional cooling methods.

Security requirements, availability: The increasing amount of stored data, threats entering through e-mails, fear from terrorism and higher availability requirements demand more secure systems with higher availability. This trend is also fuelled by different requirements, regulations and internal policies (Basel 2, SOX, BCP[1], DRP[2], etc.) The fastest possible restoration after an unplanned downtime is becoming an even more important factor not only for information systems, but also for server infrastructure: instead of MTBF[3], MTTR[4] is becoming the first priority. In case of IT devices, this change drives the emergence of modular systems and virtualization. Impact on the infrastructure: emergence of easily reparable modular solutions, increased demand for comprehensively manageable equipment.

Cost reduction: This is a general and ever-increasing requirement in all fields. Companies try to reduce their costs by cutting back on the expenditure related to employment (reducing maintenance and operating requirements) and electricity, and reducing floor space and amount of physical hardware devices. The energy costs can be significantly decreased by applying virtualization technologies on several fields (for example, remotely accessible monitoring and management systems, server consolidation, cooling power). Impact on the infrastructure: High-density devices require unconventional cooling, and infrastructure devices have to be well manageable.

Infrastructure challenges: High-density servers can generate high heat load on a much smaller place, compared to equipment manufactured a few years ago. In addition, virtualization technologies increase the average capacity utilization 5 or 6-fold. In an environment like this, cooling problems arise much earlier than power supply problems. The challenges of high-density cooling include separation of cool and warm air, increasing the efficiency of cooling, ensuring heat removal and possibilities for comprehensive manageability and predictive troubleshooting.

“Legacy systems work fine for brute-force cooling the entire room, but skyrocketing energy costs make them fiscally irresponsible and their fundamentally oversized design makes them incapable of meeting today’s high-density challenges. Even worse, power and cooling waste may actually prevent you from purchasing much-needed new IT equipment. Simple problem – simple solution: Cut your power and cooling costs and use the savings to buy the IT equipment you need,” concludes Bertrand.

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For more information on APC and MGE, please visit http://www.apc-mge.com. All trademarks are the property of their owners.

Genesis HealthCare System of Southeastern Ohio has selected the Rhapsody™ Integration Engine to serve as a platform to integrate patient data from multiple hospital information systems. Santa Monica, CA (PRWEB) January 15, 2008 — Orion Health, a leading provider of clinical workflow and integration technology for the healthcare sector, announces that Genesis HealthCare System of Southeastern Ohio has selected the Rhapsody™ Integration Engine to serve as a platform to integrate patient data from multiple hospital information systems.

“Performance and reliability were high on our list of requirements for an integration engine that would operate in a 24X7 environment,” said Linda Nolan, I.S. Deliverables Manager, Genesis HealthCare System.

“Rhapsody’s flexibility and ease of deployment made it a good fit for our IT department and the low total cost of ownership made it an easy sell to executives.”

“Awareness about the importance of protecting patient health data has increased in recent years. Rhapsody provides healthcare organizations with a flexible platform to build a system and information integration strategy that fits their unique needs,” says Paul de Bazin, Rhapsody General Manager, Orion Health.

A Best in KLAS solution, Rhapsody has been specifically designed to meet the present and future needs of health integration. The Rhapsody Engine manages and streamlines message exchange between hospital applications, databases and external systems for effortless integration. Rhapsody delivers an integration solution with the lowest cost of ownership and highest return on investment.

About Genesis HealthCare SystemGenesis HealthCare System is located in southeastern Ohio and operates a 336-bed, non-profit health system consisting of two hospitals – Bethesda and Good Samaritan, which are located approximately 1.5 miles apart. The service area includes all of Muskingum County as well as the 6 surrounding counties which combined have a total population of 225,000. Services provided at Genesis include obstetrics; pediatric; medical and surgical; emergency; critical care; cancer services; psychiatric and chemical dependency care; hospice; home care; rehabilitation; skilled nursing; community education; occupational health; expanded cardiac care and open heart surgery; inpatient and expanded cancer services and a wide range of outpatient, clinics, therapeutic and diagnostic support services.

Worldwide, Orion Health is implementing health information communities involving over 35 million patients with tens of thousands of active users including Maine’s HealthInfoNet and the Vermont Health Information Exchange. Orion Health’s partners include leading health system integrators and IT vendors such as Accenture, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Sierra Systems and others. Orion Health has more than 1,000 clients around the world, including Lahey Clinic, New York State Department of Health, UCLA Medical Center, and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More information can be found at www.orionhealth.com.